Domain Authority, or DA, is a metric developed by Moz to describe how strong a domain is relative to its ranking on the search engines. Domain Authority score is calculated by a proprietary algorithm owned by Moz and produces a score between 1 and 100. The higher your score is, the more traffic you’re likely to get from the search engines.
Keep in mind that Google does NOT take Domain Authority into account when ranking sites! It’s a metric that simply compares how authoritative your domain is compared to your competitors.
So how do you boost your domain authority? Here’s a quick guide on how you can do that.
How To Boost Your Domain Authority
Take a look at your link profile
Your link profile is a major factor in determining your domain authority. A link profile is simply a list of all the sites that link back to your site.
A healthy link profile is one that follows Google’s guidelines. By avoiding link building schemes and links that look like link schemes, you can be rest assured that your link profile is a healthy one.
Other aspects of a healthy link profile are links from diverse sources, high quality links, and a high quantity of links that point back to your site. However, quality is much more important than quantity, and too many spammy links can hurt you.
To see your link profile, use Moz’s very own tool called Link Explorer.
Aim to build high quality links
High quality links don’t just come from high authority sources. Good, high-quality links also generate relevant traffic to your site.
Your link building efforts should be focused on building these high quality links that have the potential to generate the traffic you want. It’s not just about “link juice”.
There are many ways to build high quality links, such as broken link building, guest posting, and posting on Q+A sites and forums.
Create excellent content
One of the best ways to build high quality links is to create good content. That is, content that people WANT to read, share, and link back to.
This creates a virtuous cycle where your link building efforts actually generate relevant traffic, while at the same time new links come in organically because of the quality of your content. These factors combined will improve your Domain Authority.
Build fewer low-quality links
Low quality links are hard to define, but Google and Moz know them when they see them. Low quality links are links that look like they only exist to pass link juice. If they look like they’re part of a link scheme, they’re likely low quality links and are going to result in lower Domain Authority (as well as a lower PageRank score).
Just because the source of a link is from a low authority domain doesn’t mean it’s a low quality link. It’s okay to have a fair bit of low authority links, but they should look as if they appeared naturally.
Buying links almost certainly results in building low quality links! Avoid using link buying services, as they do more harm than good for your website.
